The Ever-Principled Blue Dogs

by publius

See if you note a contradiction here.  The Hill reports:

Centrist Democrats are threatening to oppose their party’s healthcare legislation unless House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accepts changes[.]  . . .  Blue Dogs think the bill fails to do enough to reduce healthcare costs, jeopardizes jobs with a fee on employers that don’t provide health insurance, and would base a government-run healthcare plan on a Medicare payment system that already penalizes their rural districts.

I was thinking of a writing a snarky post about how these concerns are completely contradictory -- the Blue Dogs complain about costs, but then object to the best cost controls.  But Yglesias beat me to the punch, and lays everything out in more detail.  Here's the key quote:

In other words, [the Blue Dogs are] concerned that the bill (a) costs too much overall and (b) will increase the deficit. And their proposed solutions to this are to (a) increase the cost of the bill by neutering the public plan and (b) decrease the quantity of revenue by fiddling with the employer mandate.

Comments

[fledermaus]

Let them kill it if they want, there is very little any of us can do to stop them. But at least by killing a policy supported by upwards of 70% of Americans it will illustrate how broken the system is at the federal level.

"Don't believe them. Don't fear them. Don't ask anything of them." — Alexander Solzhenitsyn

[Gary Farber]

Call me a cock-eyed optimist (and certainly I know folks, and you probably do as well, who in this context would), but I prefer to think that broken as the U.S. government is, and broken as our general cultural unwillingness to full admit to our historic sins and fully make amends for them are, that we're not quite living in the Gulag Archipelago, or a regime that functions quite that oppressively.

And speaking of that, this -- "But at least by killing a policy supported by upwards of 70% of Americans it will illustrate how broken the system is at the federal level" -- seems to be a version of Philippe Gavi's "heighten the contradictions" theory.

I've never found that notion persuasive. Primarily because I'm unaware of much historical evidence for the idea that it is likely to lead to any inevitable improvement.

[Generic Viagra]

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